On Tuesday, the banging of a gavel will open the annual convention of Southern Baptists in the Ernest Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. This will be the second meeting of the SBC in post-Katrina New Orleans, in a convention center named for Ernest N. Morial, the first black mayor of New Orleans. The last time the SBC met in New Orleans, in 2012, the 7,100 messengers gathered there elected local pastor Fred Luter as President of the Southern Baptist Convention. Luter, pastor of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans, was the first black president of the SBC.
But it was not until 2021 that then SBC president J. D. Greear, a North Carolina pastor, determined to retire the gavel that was used to open SBC meetings since 1872, donated by John A. Broadus, a founding professor of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, who also believed in white supremacy and was a slave owner himself. Though the denomination had made resolutions repudiating its racist past--it was founded as a withdrawal from the Trienial Baptist Convention because of restrictions on appointing slave owners as missionaries--for some reason it did not completely follow through by retiring the gavel, and renaming buildings on the Louisville campus named after slave owners.
That's typical of the way Southern Baptists do things. They try to be a reflection of the Christian gospel, their existence as a denomination is primarily based on cooperation of churches to support two mission boards that send out missionaries, and six seminaries that train pastors and missionaries. There is no hierarchy or authority at the denominational level over its 47,000 independent, autonomous, affiliated churches. But there have been multiple attempts, over the past 30+ years since a fundamentalist movement known as the "Conservative Resurgence," a Falwellian-influenced blend of right wing politics with fundamentalist, literalist, legalistic doctrine, began controlling the seminaries, mission boards and the executive committee.
So figuring out what the messengers, who are delegates elected by each local church and sent to the convention, will do each year is not always predictable or easy. And the issues that come up have been a reflection of the size of the denomination, and an increasing diversity among the member congregations, deviating from the traditional, deep-south, Baptist resistance to change.
Membership Losses Over the Past Decade are Staggering
The total membership of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the largest non-Catholic denomination in the United States, peaked at just over 16 million in 2006, after more than a decade of increases of less than 1% each year, and steadily declining numbers of baptisms, which is the way new members are welcomed into the church. Other "vital signs" of denominational health had been in decline prior to 2006, such as enrollment at the seminaries, number of new churches started or joining each year, enrollment and attendance of people under 40 in the weekly Sunday School program, and a widening gap between total membership and actual weekly worship attendance.
Membership, as reported for 2022, was 13,223,132, a drop of 457,371 in just one year, slightly more than 1.2 million in the past three years, and more than 3 million since the 2006 peak. Attendance, which was difficult to measure during the pandemic years, has bounced back from a low point due to COVID, to just under 4 million, including almost a million reported on-line views of worship services of churches, but that is well below the 7 million attending the churches in 1980, or the 5.5 million in 2006.
Other than some tongue-clicking, and attempts to explain away the numbers, the convention annual meeting does not appear to be preparing to address any possible reason for such a drastic decline in attendance and membership. The bulk of the decline is seen in membership totals submitted by state bodies in 14 southern states, where thousands of traditional churches are aging and dying out and not being replaced by new churches, or by the minimal growth that is occurring in fringe areas, and among fringe groups.
Leadership at the denominational level, which has been in transition and flux for quite some time, resulting from resignations over moral failures, or over controversies created by scandals currently plaguing the denomination, has taken a toll. The CEO of the Executive Committee and about 19 of its 70 some odd members resigned after a convention gathering two years ago over-ruled the chair and demanded that the committee waive legal privilege to get at the bottom of a clergy abuse scandal that rivals that of the Catholic church in proportion to the size of the SBC. The president of its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, an outspoken never-Trumper, resigned over political influences and underhanded, unethical attempts to remove him from his post. Financial troubles, and more sexual abuse allegations, led to two presidents of one of the SBC's seminaries, Southwestern in Ft. Worth, resigning or being fired in the past three years. But you will find little commentary connecting all of this to the staggering drop in membership, or to any other issue that might be part of the cause behind it.
What Will Come up in New Orleans This Week
You'd think that, with this bad news about people, and in many cases whole congregations, taking the exit ramp from the denomination that kicking out its' largest, and one of its most evangelistic churches, Saddleback Valley Church in Mission Viejo, California, in an area where Southern Baptists have had minimal success planting churches or reaching people by evangelism, would be the last thing they would want to do. But no, they're willing to let the church, with a weekly attendance of 30,000, and which baptizes as many people each year as some of the state affiliates of the SBC do, be dismissed because it has ordained three women as pastors, and has put the current pastor's wife in a position as a "teaching pastor."
The executive committee dismissed the church from the denomination several months ago, but its retired pastor, Rick Warren, the author of the book, The Purpose Driven Life, a massive best-seller, is appealing the decision in New Orleans. The convention, for the most part, is made up of churches which take a "complimentarian" view of women in church leadership, that is, they cannot serve in positions of authority over men, including teaching or preaching. That will come up, and the way it is handled will say a lot about whether the SBC will have any growth in its future, or not.
An amendment proposal, made by Mike Law, pastor of Arlington Baptist Church in Virginia, would restrict membership in the SBC to churches that don't permit women to be pastors, in any capacity. Not that there are a lot of Southern Baptist churches that have women in pastoral roles, though there are close to a thousand churches in the denomination that use the term "pastor" in reference to a female staff member in the church's ministry staff, Law's proposed amendment would codify the complimentarian perspective into the denomination's bylaws. It would be the first time that a specific theological interpretation would be codified by the SBC, a wholly un-Baptist approach to denominational cooperation.
That's not likely to arrest the precipitous membership decline in the SBC. On the contrary, there are enough churches in the SBC who hold to an egalitarian approach to women in church leadership to increase the percentage and size of the already ongoing membership decline, especially if they will be required to change the title of the jobs they have given to women in their church in order to stay in the SBC. A lot of churches will just quietly stop supporting the denomination with their missions giving, and drop out.
The task force formed to handle the issues surrounding the denomination's long-delayed response to a sexual abuse by clergy scandal exposed several years ago by two Texas daily newspapers, is slated to present its report on how the SBC will handle this scandal from here on out. This has predictably been divisive, with those opposed to the denomination doing anything about it, claiming "local church autonomy" as their shield, and a smaller minority saying that this is an attack of the devil on Christian manhood and an attempt to advance creeping feminism in the churches. Believe it or not, there have been people among the more extreme, conservative elements of the SBC, who have come right out in public and said so.
The two opposing groups representing denominational politics will both be fielding candidates for the office of President. Neither group is liberal, and neither group is moderate. One is very conservative, the other is fundamentalist in their conservativism. Both want to run the denomination. Bart Barber, the current President, a Texas pastor who is the first small-church leader elected in decades, by messengers from a denomination where 90% of the churches have an attendance of 100 or fewer on any given Sunday, is the conservative. A pastor from Georgia, Mike Stone, who ran and lost two years ago, is the fundamentalist candidate. Stone's church is among a group of like-minded fundamentalists who have threatened to leave if they don't get their way. The membership is likely to continue to drop like a stone in the well regardless of which man wins. But regardless, the denomination does not have the power, nor the means, to stop this hemmorhage of members.
What Should Come up in New Orleans This Week
1. The messengers should affirm their preference to elect Willie McLauren, the current interim CEO of the Executive Committee, to the permanent position of CEO of the Executive Committee. He's proven he can do the job and it would end the denomination's streak of never having employed a person of color in any executive leadership position in spite of the fact that 25% of the membership is either Latino or African American.
2. The messengers should commit their full support to the proposals of the task force setting up means to deal with the clergy sex abuse scandal that many Southern Baptists want to sweep under the rug.
3. The independence and autonomy of each local church should be affirmed by a commitment to leave secondary and tertiary doctrinal and theological issues up to them, instead of require adherence at a denominational level. Forcing churches to a specific interpretation of the Bible is an ecclesiastical authority that the SBC has never claimed, and as Baptists, never should claim. Otherwise, they become a denominational authority that is not authorized or even mentioned in the Bible as having grounds for existence. Egalitarian or Complimentarian, Charismatic or Reformed or Fundamentalist, Baptist churches have the inherent right, according to their interpretation of scripture, to their own convictions as a matter of conscience.
It will take a whole lot more than that to reverse the decline in membership that has now reached a level where it exceeds that in mainline Protestant churches and denominations. But that will be a start. A resolution on free political conscience, and against support for political candidates whose worldview and lifestyle is not consistent with Biblical faith and practice would also be in order.
So What Does this Tell Us?
The disconnection that is widening between churches desiring to remain committed to their mission and purpose, rooted in the Christian gospel, is based on the infiltration and influence of secular politics into the affairs and business of the church. When the political affiliation of a pastor translates over into his preaching and pushes out the gospel, it causes people to reconsider their commitment to the church. That's not what they thought the church in which they had invested themselves, should be doing. And while there are a lot of conservative Christians who can't distinguish between the gospel message and the rambling grievances against the world of an aging politician, there are many who see this for what it is, as the Apostle Jude referred to it in his epistle, an ungodly intrusion of licentiousness.
Southern Baptists are at the core of American Evangelicalism. In spite of efforts to get out of their traditional past, their literalist approach to Biblical interpretation, which leads to turning the Bible and the Christian faith into a legalistic system of works aimed at pleasing an angry God, and their skewed interpretation of eschatology, or "end times prophecy," leads to an approach to Christianity that requires controlling behavior of people, whether they are Christians or not. And that has led down the path of embracing politics and politicians who do not reflect their values or beliefs. Hence, people are leaving, in large numbers, looking for a place where the sincere practice of their Christian faith is safe and protected.
We'll see what happens in New Orleans, who they elect as president, whether they take a reasonable and effective path toward resolving the manner in which sexual abuse is handled in the denomination's churches and whether they will recognize a perspective of women in ministry that is consistent with everything Jesus said about redemption and ministry in the Christian gospel.
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